Last November, NASA’s Lucy mission conducted a flyby of the asteroid Dinkinish, one of the Main Belt asteroids it will investigate as it makes its way to Jupiter. In the process, the spacecraft spotted a small moonlet orbiting the larger asteroid, now named Selam (aka. “Lucy’s baby”). The moonlet’s name, an Ethiopian name that means “peace,” pays homage to the ancient human remains dubbed “Lucy” (or Dinkinish) that were unearthed in Ethiopia in 1974. Using novel statistical calculations based on how the two bodies orbit each other, a Cornell-led research team estimates that the moonlet is only ..read more

First light for the Vera Rubin Observatory (VRO) is quickly approaching and the telescope is reaching milestone after milestone. A few weeks ago, the observatory announced that its digital camera, the largest one ever made, is complete. Now the observatory has announced that its unique primary/tertiary mirror has its first reflective coating. The Rubin’s massive digital camera has an important job and garners a lot of attention. But it’s powerless without the telescope’s innovative primary/tertiary mirror. Primary mirrors are always the most critical and time-consuming part of modern observato ..read more

A beautiful nebula in the southern hemisphere with a binary star at it’s center seems to break our standard models of stellar evolution. But new data from the European Southern Observatory (ESO) suggests that there may once have been three stars, and that one was destroyed in a catastrophic collision. About 3800 light years away, in the Southern constellation of Norma, you can find an object called the Dragon’s Egg Nebula (catalogue number NGC 6164). In the heart of this nebula lies a double star known as HD 148937. The pair are bright enough to be seen through binoculars and small telescopes ..read more

The history of astronomy and observatories is full of stories about astronomers going higher and higher to get better views of the Universe. On Earth, the best locations are at places such as the Atacama Desert in Chile. So, that’s where the University of Tokyo Atacama Observatory just opened its high-altitude eye on the sky, atop Cerro Chajnantor. This unique new observatory, which was just commissioned on April 30th, sits at 5,640 meters (3.5 miles) above sea level, making it the highest observatory in the world—with a Guinness World Record recognition to prove it. The idea is to use this po ..read more

Few space images are as iconic as those of the Horsehead Nebula. Its shape makes it instantly recognizable. Over the decades, a number of telescopes have captured its image, turning it into a sort of test case for a telescope’s power. The JWST has them all beat. The Horsehead Nebula is about 1300 light-years away in Orion. It’s part of the much larger Orion Molecular Cloud Complex. Horsehead is visible near the three stars in Orion’s Belt in a zoomed-in image. The Horsehead Nebula is visible in this image of Orion’s Belt. It’s in the lower left, extending horizontally, to the lower left of the ..read more

When the first stars in the Universe formed, the only material available was primordial hydrogen and helium from the Big Bang. Astronomers call these original stars Population Three stars, and they were extremely massive, luminous, and hot stars. They’re gone now, and in fact, their existence is hypothetical. But if they did exist, they should’ve left their fingerprints on nearby gas, and astrophysicists are looking for it. The hunt for the Universe’s Population 3 (Pop III) stars is important in astrophysics. They were the first to form astronomical metals, elements heavier than hydrogen and h ..read more

The JWST is flexing its muscles with its interferometry mode. Researchers used it to study a well-known extrasolar system called PDS 70. The goal? To test the interferometry mode and see how it performs when observing a complex target. The mode uses the telescope’s NIRISS (Near Infrared Imager and Slitless Spectrograph) as an interferometer. It’s called Aperture Masking Interferometry (AMI) and it allows the JWST to reach its highest level of spatial resolution. A team of astronomers used the JWST’s AMI to observe the PDS 70 system. PDS 70 is a young T-Tauri star about 5.4 million years old. A ..read more

During the Space Race, scientists in both the United States and the Soviet Union investigated the concept of ion propulsion. Like many early Space Age proposals, the concept was originally explored by luminaries like Konstantin Tsiolkovsky and Hermann Oberth – two of the “forefathers of rocketry.” Since then, the technology has been validated repeatedly by missions like the Deep Space-1 (DS-1) technology demonstrator, the ESA’s Smart-1 lunar orbiter, JAXA’s Hayabusa and Hayabysa 2 satellites, and NASA’s Dawn mission. Looking to the future of space exploration, researchers at the NASA Glenn Res ..read more

Well over 5,000 planets have been found orbiting other star systems. One of the satellites hunting for them is TESS, the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite. Astronomers using TESS think they are made a rather surprising discovery; their first free-floating – or rogue – planet. The planet was discovered using gravitational microlensing where the planet passed in front of a star, distorting its light and revealing its presence. We are all familiar with the eight planets in our Solar System and perhaps becoming familiar with the concept of exoplanets. But there is another category of planet, t ..read more

Planetary nebula are some of nature’s most stunning visual displays. The name is confusing since they’re the remains of stars, not planets. But that doesn’t detract from their status as objects of captivating beauty and intense scientific study. Like all planetary nebula, the Southern Ring Nebula is the remnant of a star like our Sun. As these stars age, they will eventually become red giants, expanding and shedding layers of gas out into space. Eventually, the red giant becomes a white dwarf, a stellar remnant bereft of fusion that emanates whatever residual thermal energy it has without ever ..read more